Friday, November 12, 2010

This Veterans Day week, I’ve been remembering my first impressions of civil rights leader, death penalty abolitionist, and Korean War veteran, the late Dr. Mario Guerra Obledo. He was courtly. Reserved. Quiet. Polite. Respectful. I don’t remember his exact height, but to me he stood far above everyone around him.

One of 12 children born to Mexican immigrants in San Antonio, Texas, Dr. Obledo enlisted in the Navy in 1951, serving on a ship in radar technology. After the war, Dr. Obledo went back to his home state. He earned his undergraduate degree in pharmacy from the University of Texas in Austin, and later, his law degree from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio.

Like many veterans of color, Dr. Obledo returned from fighting a war for democracy and freedom in another country to find that such rights and freedoms were not always upheld for people of color in the United States. Pete Tijerina, another Latino war veteran, returned from combat with an idea to start a civil rights organization in support of Latinos. He met Dr. Obledo at a social function. With help from a $2.2 million dollar Ford Foundation grant and assistance from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the two veterans founded MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. MALDEF launched Dr. Obledo’s civil rights activism.

Years later, when I met Dr. Obledo in the mid-1980s, he was the President of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the nation’s oldest and largest Latino civil rights organization. I was a reporter, covering Congress for a local Washington, D.C. radio station. I interviewed him during that period after his news conferences or his testimony before Congressional hearings concerning racism against Latinos or U.S. immigration policy reform.

I wasn’t involved in the death penalty abolition movement yet, so I had no idea that Dr. Obledo was an abolitionist. He worked diligently to end the death penalty in California, where the National Coalition of Hispanic Organizations, which he headed and co-founded, is based, and in other states where it is still practiced.

Ten years ago, in his capacity as the President of the Coalition, Dr. Obledo signed an open letter to President Clinton, calling for a moratorium on federal executions. Other signers included leaders of the ACLU, NAACP, the National Organization for Women, and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. The December 4, 2000 letter was a response to a Department of Justice survey of the federal death penalty authorization process. The survey revealed that, of the federal capital defendants against whom the Attorney General authorized seeking the death penalty, 69% were Hispanic and African American (18% and 51% respectively), while only 25% were white.

“We are aware of your support for the death penalty under some circumstances and we are not asking that you change your long-held position,” the letter read in part. “We are asking only that you prevent an unconscionable event in American history — executing individuals while the government is still determining whether gross unfairness has led to their death sentences.

In 2006, Dr. Obledo served on the advisory board of the American Bar Association Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project, which examined whether the death penalty was administered fairly and with due process. To the extent flaws were identified in states’ death penalty systems, states could use the Project’s findings in reforming their systems, impose moratoriums, and/or launch more comprehensive self-examinations of death penalty-related laws and processes. The Project examined death penalty systems in Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee.

While on the advisory board, Dr. Obledo illustrated how racial and economic disparities in the application of death sentences stem from years of racial and economic discrimination. “I think they should do away with the death penalty,” he said. “Most people convicted are minorities. People of color, or minorities. Only the poor people get executed. The people with money never get executed. That’s why the system should be changed. You would make sure no injustice would occur.”

As is the case with African Americans, Latinos are often disproportionately represented on death row. Approximately 11% of death row prisoners nationally are Latino, while Latinos comprise 15% of the U.S. population. In California, the percentage of Latinos sentenced to death and incarcerated on death row is increasing. According to a report by ACLU of Northern California, “Death in Decline 2009” Latinos comprised 50% of new death sentences in 2007, 38% of death sentences in 2008, and 31% of death sentences in 2009. There is no documented information regarding what is behind these troubling statistics. However, the report notes that the lack of Latinos on California’s juries and the sentencing decisions made by California’s District Attorneys might be among the driving factors.

Dr. Obledo’s contributions to death penalty abolition and civil rights were many. Dr. Obledo died suddenly this August after a heart attack at age 78. While others undoubtedly remember and laud Dr. Obledo for his civil rights activism in LULAC, MALDEF and the National Coalition of Hispanic Organizations, I will always remember, and appreciate, his having devoted a portion of his busy life trying to end the barbaric, racially and economically biased and ineffective crime-fighting tool that is capital punishment.

Margaret Summers is the Director of Communications for the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.

Sunday, April 04, 2010

During Easter season, Christians worldwide celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It occurs in the early spring, a season rife with anticipation and the promise of new beginnings; of the shoots of green plants pushing their way through soil warmed by the sun, thawed after a long and frozen winter; of new leaves opening on trees and bushes; of blossoming flowers upturned to the rays of a welcoming sun.

This year, in a tragic historic coincidence, Easter Sunday fell on the 42nd anniversary of the killing of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., civil and human rights champion, a self-described “drum major for peace.” Dr. King was shot dead on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel with friends and fellow activists. They were in Memphis to support economic justice for striking sanitation workers, a majority of whom were African American.

Uprisings exploded in several urban U.S. cities in reaction to the murder – expressions of uncontrollable grief, rage, and hopelessness, now that the man who had led millions up figurative mountaintops where all could share in his vision of a promised land where races could live together in equality, respect and love, was so violently and brutally taken from them.

Undoubtedly such anger and anguish back then prompted many to call for the execution of whoever was responsible for killing Dr. King. But neither Dr. King nor his immediate family had ever supported capital punishment. For Dr. King, a follower of the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, whose massive nonviolent demonstrations brought down British colonial rule in India – a tactic that Dr. King later used with great success in the sit-ins, pray-ins, and other anti-segregation protests in the Deep South – it was impossible to simultaneously believe in nonviolence as a way of life and also believe in the death penalty.

Dr. King felt the punishment effectively writes off human beings as forever irredeemable and unforgivable. “Make your way to death row and speak with the tragic victims of criminality,” he said. “As they prepare to make their pathetic walk to the electric chair, their hopeless cry is that society will not forgive. Capital punishment is society's final assertion that it will not forgive.”

“I do not think God approves the death penalty for any crime - rape and murder included,” Dr. King asserted. “Capital punishment is against the best judgment of modern criminology and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of God.”

Dr. King’s family, suddenly left without a husband and father 42 years ago, nevertheless agreed with his views that the death penalty perpetuates violence.

“As one whose husband and mother-in-law have died the victims of murder assassination, I stand firmly and unequivocally opposed to the death penalty for those convicted of capital offenses,” his widow, Coretta Scott King, once said. “An evil deed is not redeemed by an evil deed of retaliation. Justice is never advanced in the taking of a human life. Morality is never upheld by a legalized murder.”

Such sentiments have been echoed by two of his children. “Having lost my father and grandmother to gun violence, I will understand the deep hurt and anger felt by the loved ones of those who have been murdered,” Reverend Bernice King, recently named President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which was once led by her father, had stated. “Yet I can't accept the judgment that their killers deserve to be executed. This merely perpetuates the tragic, unending cycle of violence that destroys our hope for a decent society.” His son, Martin Luther King, III, who was named for his father and grandfather, was quoted as saying, “I should be on the front line for those advocating the death penalty, [but] we have always been consistently against the death penalty.”

The King family’s beliefs are not unusual. They are shared by many murder victims’ families. Among the members of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty’s Board of Directors, three individuals – New Hampshire State Rep. Robert “Renny” Cushing, Bill Pelke and Bud Welch – lost family members to murder. Rep. Cushing’s father was killed by gunfire through the family home’s screen door. Pelke’s grandmother was killed in the course of a robbery of her home by four teenaged girls. Welch’s daughter was killed in the Oklahoma City federal building bombing.

The three are active in organizations working to rid the United States and the world of capital punishment – Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation, Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights, and Journey of Hope . . . from Violence to Healing. Victims’ families and the death penalty abolition movement have long worked together to let the public know that the death penalty does not help, but harms such families. The expensive punishment drains needed resources from grief counseling, victims’ families’ compensation, and other services and programs that enable these families to heal. Together, the voices of abolitionists and such murder victims’ families’ organizations and victims’ family members are amplified, united, as they say, “Please – don’t kill in our names.”

It is my hope that this Easter season, as many of us celebrate the resurrection of He who also stood for nonviolence and peace, we remember the words of Dr. King and his family members who rejected a punishment system that in the end dehumanizes us all. “The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy,” Dr. King said. “... In fact, violence merely increases hate. ... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.”

Friday, September 25, 2009

Five days ago in economically distressed Rockford, Illinois, a 23-year old Black man named Mark Anthony Barmore was shot to death in a church-run daycare filled with children, as reported by the Associated Press.

Witness claim Barmore who tried to evade police, emerged to surrender from a closet in the church, but police officers shot him anyway.

Though this case is unfolding, and all the facts are not known at this time, the refrain in Black America and beyond is, "Would this have likely happened to a white person?"

Increasingly, Afro-Netizen has noticed clear acknowledgment of racism from white people about other white people's motivations -- even within mainstream media. This new, seemingly unprecedented phenomenon is a good and important trend that is not nearly as comprehensive or rigorous as it should be. However, the extent to which race and racism can be brought up appropriately at the urging of white allies may influence America's tolerance for having such meaningful public discussions that have rarely occurred heretofore.

Finally, at the intersection of media, politics and policy, there was the ever eloquent and ubiquitous Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. at the young Barmore's funeral, a tragic fatality amidst an era that many optimists and delusional voters had quizzically embraced as post-racial with the ascent of Barack Obama to the Oval Office.

Post-racial in this context suggests that "getting beyond race" is the task and ultimate goal. For progressive-minded Americans, however, the goal is in acknowledging that race and racism are all too real social constructions that will endure until we embrace racial justice as a core component of the fight for universal human rights.

Rockford activists and concerned residents understand this in a blighted city north of Chicago with rampant unemployment, crime and urban blight.

They know these ills are all related, and that these socio-economic disparities highly correlate to race in ways that America's first Black president will not (and perhaps cannot politically) affirm, unlike his elderly, white Southern predecessor, former president Jimmy Carter, leveraging the white privilege he has towards shedding light on the truth too powerful for a sitting president in this day and age to co-sign -- irrespective of his race or political party.

Whatever level of culpability the two white Rockford police officers and the deceased Barmore had for what quickly escalated to a man's death -- as witnessed in a church by young children -- this much is true: a crime took place on that fateful day that is as political and resonant as the election of a Black president.

The questions remain in the aftermath of such symptomatic violence: Do we know what's on the referendum? When and where we must vote, and how to cast our ballots?

Friday, September 11, 2009

Some mourn for the Americans who were killed in the Attacks of September 11th. Many like me mourn the tragic deaths of all who were killed in the attacks in New York City, Washington, DC and Shanksville, PA and the related deaths that preceded the Attacks here and abroad.

Others also mourn the soldiers and civilians killed in the military aftermath of the Attacks.

Peace-loving Muslims and other enlightened people of faith around the world mourn the seemingly indelible stain they fear those 19 assassins put on Islam when they weaponized those hijacked planes on September 11th.

Many mourn the theft of civil liberties and the shunning of humanitarianism in pursuit of an instant balm that still scars instead of heals our small, imperiled planet.

Still more mourn the narrowing of what once was a broad-shouldered patriotism that could not be confused with jingoistic rhetoric, obsequious complicity with the war-mongers, and conspicuous ornamentation that for too many in positions of influence has been a derelict proxy for moral courage and humanitarian leadership.

On September 11th, I watched in stunned silence evil strike where Ground Zero now remains.

Silence is how many have chosen to honor the lives -- not lost -- but stolen from this physical world, by what happens when festering rage turns to terror.

Indeed, we mourn in different ways.

But silence is not always reverence. And as we have seen in the aftermath of the Attacks, silence can also be the enemy.

Nationalistic pageantry has little meaning to me either as we memorialize the dead who hailed from more places far beyond American borders -- from more nations than most of us can identify on a map.

No, today, Afro-Netizen will memorialize this infamous day of terror by sharing a song whose lyrics were borne out of a centuries-long tradition of coping with terror called, "We Shall Overcome", a protest song whose simple, but moving melody comes in part from "No More Auction Block For Me also known as "Many Thousands Gone", 19th century spirituals deeply rooted in the scourge of America's domestic terrorism of slavery and Jim Crow.

So, in some ways "We Shall Overcome" is indeed a mourning song, yet one that is anything but mournful.

Its lyrics, gravitas, cultural resonance -- and its history of how, why and where it has been sung all represent the hope, humility and humanity that to me provide the balm so missing from the often cynical marketing of this important anniversary.

We Shall Overcome(lyrics)

We shall overcome, we shall overcome,
We shall overcome someday;Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,
We shall overcome someday.

The Lord will see us through, The Lord will see us through,
The Lord will see us through someday;
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,
We shall overcome someday.We're on to victory, We're on to victory,
We're on to victory someday;
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,
We're on to victory someday.We'll walk hand in hand, we'll walk hand in hand,We'll walk hand in hand someday;
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,
We'll walk hand in hand someday.We are not afraid, we are not afraid,We are not afraid today;
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,
We are not afraid today.The truth shall make us free, the truth shall make us free,
The truth shall make us free someday;
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,
The truth shall make us free someday.We shall live in peace, we shall live in peace,We shall live in peace someday;
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,
We shall live in peace someday.